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We prototyped https://www.moonlightwork.com https://www.moonlightwork.com without code. Here was our basic workflow: 1. Marketing site set up using Squarespac
by philip1209 8y ago
We prototyped https://www.moonlightwork.com https://www.moonlightwork.com without code.
Here was our basic workflow:
1. Marketing site set up using Squarespace
2. Developers apply using Typeform. We add them to a Google Sheet with Zapier.
3. New jobs submitted through Typeform, which triggers an email to us
4. We manually set up a new Google Form to collect proposals. We send the results google sheet to the client.
5. We manually search for developers that match the skills of the project and email them all manually to ask them to submit a proposal using the Google Form.
6. Project owner selects a developers. We docusign a contract to both parties.
7. We send a google sheet to the developer to log hours
8. Every week we go through the developer timesheet and manually issue an invoice using PaidLabs.com (with Stripe at backend)
9. When the payment gets deposited, we pay the developer (wire transfer outside USA, Payable.com inside the USA)
We slowly automated each step with a web app, which was published part-by-part as we finished automating a particular step. We did about $100K GMV with this no-code stack before we completed the end-to-end web application.
Today, Moonlight is profitable and bootstrapped. We still manually prototype things. For example, we came up with the idea of a subscription product on Tuesday last week. We had a client agree to it, so we issued an invoice through Stripe Invoices on Friday, collected the money, and are now starting to build subscriptions into the app.
- infinitone 8y agoWhat does Paidlabs.com do that stripe doesn't? Stripe does invoicing AFAIK.
- philip1209 8y agoWhen we started in Spring 2017, Stripe did not do invoicing. (Paid is a YC company, btw!)
- toomuchtodo 8y agoDo you plan on continuing to use Paid? Or will you migrate away to Stripe's invoicing? EDIT: My apologies for the misunderstanding! I didn't realize that you've already built that functionality from your top comment.
- philip1209 8y agoWe built invoicing into our product! One of our technical needs was auto-charging clients for overdue invoices that were neither approved nor disputed. That's application logic, not something we can use an external system for.
- mrguyorama 8y agoWhy does your website ask to autoplay sound on firefox?
- philip1209 8y agoNo idea - I'm not seeing this on my end. Can you email us (team at moonlightwork.com) and we can debug?
- owenconti 8y agoIt could be that chat system in the bottom right? Maybe it makes a notification sound?
- philip1209 8y agoAh, that could be it. It's intercom.io - which is fairly ubiquitous on the internet.
- mr_puzzled 8y agoDid you guys apply to YC this cycle? If I signup as a developer, how easy/hard would it be to find a gig? I assume the supply of good developers is not an issue so finding work would be hard.
- philip1209 8y ago> Did you guys apply to YC this cycle? Yes, we applied to YC. We didn't get an interview. I assume that the market size isn't big enough for VC. > If I signup as a developer, how easy/hard would it be to find a gig? Contracting kind of depends on how much energy you put in. We've seen smart people not try that hard, and get zero gigs after 20 applications. On the opposite end, professional contractors who give thoughtful applications get many jobs at high hourly rates. Moonlight can only net increase your job flow. If you are in need of contract work, you can always email us (team at moonlightwork.com) and we'll manually coach you on improving applications, and make warm intros to clients. (We have had success doing this manually over the past month, and are contemplating on turning it into an automated "I'm available right now" flow in the product.)
- shanghaiaway 8y ago> Yes, we applied to YC. We didn't get an interview. I assume that the market size isn't big enough for VC. Worse ideas with smaller markets have been funded by YC. I'm guessing you could have gotten in if you pitched a larger vision.
- civilian 8y ago"As the Gig Economy hits Tech, ALL TECH JOBS will be performed through Moonlight! Market cap > 4q"
- profalseidol 8y agoCan somebody who's worked with legacy J2EE applications get a gig? All the buzzword right now is fullstack react/angular + lots of tools to make javascript development scale. Most of my recent experience right now is stopping/starting JBoss and figuring out how to sneak in yet another feature into a 15 yr old java codebase.
- trulykp 8y agoThat is a great story of grit! Love it, thanks for sharing.
- philip1209 8y agoThanks! We're approaching the 2-year anniversary of starting Moonlight. That's a long time to work on a business! It's been a long journey to understand what customers want. I think that a subscription product is our future, and we didn't figure that out until last week! But, we even tested that manually - and, in doing so, have done more net revenue in the previous seven days than we did in the first year of our business. We've fortunately been ramen profitable this year, but I hope that in 2019 we can start to focus on growth!
- paulie_a 8y agoI'm sorry to say but 2 years is not a long time when starting a business. That's just getting started. It's a long road. The fact you are profitable is great, but it's a marathon not a race.
- philip1209 8y agoI definitely agree! I more refer to the fact that we have not yet hit the turning point of clear product/market fit after two years.
- sjcsjc 8y agoSprint? A marathon is a race ;-)
- zacharycohn 8y agoLove it. I wrote a blog post about a subscription notification business I started called Amazing Airfare. I iterated in much the same way - everything was manual, automated things as I grew and scaled and it made sense to. Wrote a post about it here: https://medium.com/@zacharycohn/on-mvps-glueing-things-together-and-270-flights-to-south-africa-721d7208fb16 https://medium.com/@zacharycohn/on-mvps-glueing-things-toget...
- sbilstein 8y agoVery similar for my business’ various pivots. When you don’t have seed funding, this feels like the ONLY way to go.
- joshstrange 8y agoPretty off-topic but I'm going to throw it out there anyways. I play a game call Factorio, a quick run down it is a procedurally generated, top-down (2.5D ish) game where you can move around your character to mine materials, build things, etc. A huge part of the game is automating the creation of various items. For example iron gears are used in a number of lower-level items and while when you go to craft an item it will automatically build all the intermediate items (providing you have the materials) this becomes tedious very quickly (by design). I find that playing the game requires a healthy balance between #AutomateAllTheThings and "Don't waste time building a huge factory for something you need very little of OR you don't know how much of it you will need". This same experience/way-of-thinking applies heavily to development/programming in the form of "Premature Optimization". In my first Factorio game I spent WAY too much time building massive factories to pump up every single item I needed. This lead to a boring grind and wasn't efficient at all. I was overwhelmed with making sure I always had a chest full of X item ready for me that I wasted a bunch of time (which, to be fair, in Factorio I didn't exactly waste the time as I had fun). For me this resonates heavily with as it lead to a sort of "analysis paralysis" that I immediately recognized from my attempts at a side business. The next thing I attempt I am going to make a conscious effort to focus on a MVP above all else and ignore scale completely. My last attempts at building a side business have spiraled out of control quickly as I attempt to right all the wrongs, foresee all the potential issues, side steps all the mistakes I saw happen at work, etc. In some ways I really miss my days in high school when I would open up a blank php file and start coding instead of wasting HOURS looking into various tech stacks/frameworks/libraries/etc in an attempt to "future proof" my setup. I realize now it's a fool's errand. That's not to say you should never think about how you would scale but at the same time don't let the idea of future success keep you from creating the exact things you are trying to future proof.
- welder 8y agoWanna use https://wakatime.com https://wakatime.com to automate 7, 8, & 9?
- npmn 8y agoHi All, I want to start something similar and I have a list of around 175+ Good Remote developers from around the globe who are looking for Gigs. I am currently looking for a US Based partner who can oversee getting client proposals. My email is in my bio.
- JSeymourATL 8y agoToptal does a pretty good job packaging/marketing remote devs to US based corporate clients...>https://www.toptal.com/ https://www.toptal.com/ Is your idea different?